I Am Not This
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day 1294a. After the incident at McKinley, Kitty is left shaken, and it forces her to contemplate who she's been and who she wants to be. - Top 15, number 3, Kitty


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 61st cycle. Now cycle 62!_

**_TOP 15_****_ COUNTDOWN - _**_Something I do once in a while, if you will recall, where I take my favorite characters, ships, friendships, series (from my daily stories) and put them in order, the number 1 of which gets a seven-chapter story in the end :)  
Coming in at number 3: Kitty Wilde_

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**_This is a shift day. _**_There are two updates today._

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**"I Am Not This"  
Kitty**

She had held her senses on the highest alert for so long, and now that it was all over, she didn't know how to turn them off.

Her parents had come, they'd picked her up and brought her home, and by all means that should have been the end of it. The crisis was over and she was back somewhere she knew she was supposed to be safe. Having her family there, looking at her, asking her questions, she had to remove herself from that situation or she would go crazier than she already felt. So she had gone to her room.

The door to her room was shut, but she couldn't help but feel like this was a recreation of what her day had become the moment those shots had been heard. She could hear everything. The floor beneath her bare feet, the ticking of her clock, the wind outside her window… static sounds and the ringing in her ears… She had to grab her iPod and turn the music up as she sat on her bed, trying to make things less tense. She tried to close her eyes, get lost in the music, and it sort of worked for a while.

Her mother had not thought things through when she came into her room. With her headphones on, she had not heard or seen her coming, and the moment she'd entered her periphery, Kitty had leapt up about as fast as her heart lodged itself in her throat.

She would be alright eventually, she knew… she hoped… But she wasn't alright, not yet, and if anyone said anything about that, then they had better run for cover.

She had never been as afraid as she'd been, sitting in the choir room that day, but what else was she going to be, with someone roaming the halls with a gun?

It never used to affect her. She had seen countless action movies and procedural cop shows, and she never flinched, not for the shot, not for the one who was wounded or killed. It wasn't real, nothing but fiction. She was human, wasn't she? If anyone was hurt, she would feel bad for them. But she would sit and watch a movie with others and wonder why they made such a big deal of everything they saw.

She could still recall the rattling of her bones when she'd heard those shots in McKinley. She'd been to plenty of ear-shattering concerts and rowdy football matches, but those two bursts had been the loudest thing she had ever heard. Even long after they had ended, they still echoed in her head.

She didn't know what it was about the whole experience that really stayed with her. The fear, obviously, the fear had been so vivid, grappling at her heart with claws of steel, but that was a natural reaction to what had and could have happened. No, if she had to hold on to something from that day for the rest of her life, it wasn't going to be how scared of dying she had been, it was that for the first time she was realizing she had something to hold on to that was making her whole oddity of a life worth living. It wasn't like she'd wanted to die before, but now she wanted to live. There was a world of difference between those two things.

What was it that made it so hard for her to get to a place where she could tell someone that she was happy, that they made her happy? There were some parts of her life, parts she didn't share with anyone, and she could understand how they might affect some of how she felt able to interact with people, but it shouldn't have been so hard to let people see her smile, see her joyful. _But one thing could lead to another._ She talked a big game, because it was easier to feel like she was strong that way, but she knew one of these days it would come back to bite her.

On that day, sitting in that room, scared that she would never leave it again, her whole self had united with a burst of realization and confession. If she might die, if any of them, she wanted to be out there, what they'd given her when she had deserved nothing but an entire Christmas stocking full of coal.

She'd ended up in Glee Club 'despite herself,' she would tell everyone and herself included. She had to show them that she was just as special as they were, probably more, and that no one was going to make her feel second best ever again. She was taking big risks every time she tried to shine, bigger than any of them realized – not that she was looking for them to realize a damn thing.

In the beginning it had been easy to sit there with a perpetual glare, ready to throw wrenches left and right. Wasn't it how they said though, about getting to love something, or someone, it usually happened before you ever understood that was what it was, and since she was so very behind everyone else in that department, then it had blindsided her. She never stood a chance.

So what did one do when the thing they had set out to despise with all their might turned out to be the best thing that had ever happened to them? If they were her, they kept it buried and continued as they had always done, hoping no one would realize they were having a blast.

Except in one tiny little moment, Kitty-the-Gleek had emerged, fully-realized, and she wanted it known that she was amongst the people who had made this the best year of her life. She wasn't going to change who she was, but she would do her best to be kinder on occasion. Maybe with time it would all get easier, and she wouldn't feel so awkward about opening up and showing the sides of herself she had guarded so tightly she'd nearly choked them out.

It was going to take a few days maybe before she wasn't so hyper alert all the time, and she didn't have much faith for how much sleep she would get that night. But then she had picked up her phone and she had texted Unique, texted Marley. None of them could sleep either, and they would text back and forth for some time until, finally they could all sleep, secure in the knowledge that they had a lifeline at the end of their fingers.

THE END

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******A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.  
****In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are  
************always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!**


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